Mark Anderson: And now to add to the Anderson Family Circus – where is she? There she is. Come on up, Berit!

My daughter, Berit, who is an entrepreneur in her own right, CEO of Scout media. And she’s going to talk for a minute or two, just very briefly, about her take on the exact same kind of work that we’re doing, in her own way.

Berit Anderson: Hello. I’m here to welcome all of you tonight to the “Oh, shit” era. [Laughter] And here’s what I mean by that. We’re living in a world with exponential technology change. We’re living in a world with shifting economic rules. And we’re living in a world with new emerging international power standards. And in a time like this, it’s more important than ever to have your own personal interface and way of cultivating your own personal relationship with the future.

There are a lot of people out there who will tell you that, you know, it’s impossible to predict the future. They’re wrong. If there’s one thing that I’ve learned from growing up with this guy, it’s that not only can you see the effects of these trends before they actually play out, but more importantly, you can see the effects of these trends far before the rest of the world has any idea that they’re even on the horizon.

And so at SNS, they’ve been working with patterns and pattern recognition to do this. I’m the CEO of a company called Scout, and at Scout we’re bringing people into that loop. What we’re doing is we’re building a social interface for the future. And what that means is, we are actually building a platform – a social network – that lets you connect with the predictions and the people and the news that will shape your view of the future. So we’ve been talking, and will continue to talk, about how we can integrate these two visions of the future, and how to think about the future and predict the future.

I’m sure you’ll be hearing more about that in the months and weeks to come. But for now, I want to just turn things over to your personal “Oh, shit” consultant for the evening, Mark Anderson.

Review of SNS Initiatives

Mark Anderson: Thanks, Berit. Well done. Couldn’t have been a better introduction.

We promised you this evening to talk about radical change in this coming year, and it’s no secret that that’s on its way. I want to start by recognizing a few of the people here, and some of the initiatives that we’ve created to try to deal with radical change.

Richard Hyman – are you here, Richard? Richard’s helping us create INVNT/IP, which you heard [earlier] from Evan [Anderson]. So, we have Inventing Nations vs. Nation-sponsored Theft of crown jewel IP. We’ve spent five years on this. We’re pretty serious about it; we think it’s the most important thing in the global economy. So thank you, Richard, for helping us do that.

We have this [initiative] called the Carbon Trifecta. We started a company this evening, actually, so we’re celebrating that process. We now have a new nonprofit, which we hope will go global, where we turn carbon capture into a real, meaningful thing instead of the bullshit it’s been until now, where we turn CO2 into a very valuable commodity – the most valuable commodity in the world: graphene. And then we use 3D printing to take it from being a hobby to being a massive revolution in manufacturing, using the only chemical that could actually make that happen, which is graphene. So I’m very excited about that. We have four national laboratories that are helping us now do that.

And we have a few people here from a company called Coventry Computer – you can choose whether or not to raise your hands – but it’s a stealth company, and it came out of FiRe [the SNS Future in Review conference]. We’re very excited about it. It will be a radical departure in the world of computer architecture and AI.

And we have people from FiReFilms. Sharon Anderson Morris is leading it, and there are other folks here who are filmmakers. We’re very happy to have you with us. We’ve worked pretty hard to make sure that the world knows what’s going on in good things, particularly how technology drives improvements in the human condition, and FiReFilms is all about that.

And last but not least: tonight, thanks to Sally Anderson, wherever she is – we have the first [FiReBooks] physical book we’ve ever made: Stealth Japan, by Scott Foster, who lives in Tokyo. It’s the best book on how the Japanese make money. I encourage you to buy it next week on Amazon.com.

So we’re pretty busy trying to get stuff done, but tonight it’s all about talk.

I usually try to break this [evening] into three pieces; I’ll try to get you out of here pretty soon. I do an economic landscape conversation, and then a tech landscape conversation, then 10 quick predictions, and then we can go play some more.